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Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris Kostrowitzky) was born in Rome on August 26, 1880. He purposefully kept his parentage clouded in speculation but was most likely the illegitimate child of Angelica Kostrowitzky, a Polish woman living in the Vatican. Apollinaire was raised in the gambling halls of Monaco, Paris, and the French Riviera; during his education in Cannes, Nice, and Monaco, he assumed the identity of a Russian prince.

In his twenties he worked for a Parisian bank and kept company with artists such as Picasso, Braques, Chagall, Max Jacob, Eric Satie, Marcel Duchamp, and his lover, Marie Laurencin. During this time, he published a number of semi-pornographic books, proclaiming that the writing of the Marquis de Sade would gain prominence in the new century.

Apollinaire's first collection of poetry, L'enchanteur pourrissant, appeared in 1909, and his reputation was established in 1913 with Alcools, a melange of classical versification and modern imagery. Apollinaire had a reputation as a thief—he was detained for a week in 1911 on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa—and decided to become a French national by enlisting in the infantry during World War I.

He was stationed on the front in Champagne until 1916, when he suffered a head wound and had to be trepanned. He outlined his poetic and political beliefs in L'esprit nouveau et les poëtes in 1917. In 1918, after a series of short-lived affairs, he married Jacqueline Kolb. War-weakened, Apollinaire died shortly after of the Spanish Flu on November 9, 1918, in Paris. Calligrammes, a collection of concrete poetry, was published a few months after his death.

Apollinaire was an important part of several avant-garde movements in French literature and art at the start of the twentieth century. His influences include the Symbolist poets of the former generation: Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, and Tristan Corbière.

His work is often concerned with the clash between the modern and the traditional, often juxtaposing drastically different stylistic elements: it exhibits gritty modern imagery in traditional forms, for example. His book Peintres cubistes (1913) expounded on the theory behind cubism and analyzed the work of important cubists. His play La mamelles de Tirésias, which was made into an opera by Francis Poulenc in 1947, is one of the earliest examples of Surrealism—a word he is credited for coining.

Zone

Guillaume Apollinaire, 1880 - 1918

At last you're tired of this elderly world
Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating
You're fed up living with antiquity
Even the automobiles are antiques
Religion alone remains entirely new religion
Remains as simple as an airport hangar
In all Europe only you O Christianism are not old
The most modem European Pope Pius X it's you
The windows watch and shame has sealed
The confessionals against you this morning
Flyers catalogs hoardings sing aloud
Here's poetry this morning and for prose you're reading the tabloids
Disposable paperbacks filled with crimes and police
Biographies of great men a thousand various titles
I saw a pretty street this morning I forgot the name
New and cleanly it was the sun's clarion
Executives laborers exquisite stenographers
Criss-cross Monday through Saturday four times daily
Three times every morning sirens groan
At the lunch hour a rabid bell barks
The lettering on the walls and billboards
the doorplates and posters twitters parakeet-style
I love the swank of that street
Situated in Paris between the rue Aumont-Thieville and the avenue des Ternes
Here's the young street and you're still a baby
Dressed by your mother in blue and white only
You're very pious and with your oldest friend Rene Dalize
Nothing is more fun than Masses and Litanies
It's nine o'clock the gaslight is low you leave your bed
You pray all night in the school chapel
Meanwhile an eternal adorable amethyst depth
Christ's flamboyant halo spins forever
Behold the beautiful lily of worship
Behold the red-haired torch inextinguishable
Behold the pale son and scarlet of the dolorous Mother
Behold the tree forever tufted with prayer
Behold the double gallows honor and eternity
Behold the six-pointed star
Behold the God who dies on Friday and rises on Sunday
Behold the Christ who flies higher than aviators
He holds the world's record for altitude
Christ pupil of the eye
Twentieth pupil of the centuries knows its stuff
And bird-changed this century like Jesus climbs the sky
Devils in the abyss look up to watch
They say this century mimics Simon Magus in Judea
It takes a thief to catch a thief they cry
Angels flutter around the pretty trapeze act
Icarus Enoch Elijah Apollonius of Tyana
Hover as close to the airplane as they can
Sometimes they give way to other men hauling the Eucharist
Priests eternally climbing the elevating Host
The plane descends at last its wings unfolded
bursts into a million swallows
Full speed come the crows the owls and falcons
From Africa ibis storks flamingoes
The Roc-bird famous with writers and poets
Glides Adam's skull the original head in its talons
The horizon screams an eagle pouncing
And from America there comes a hummingbird
From China sinuous peehees
Who have only one wing and who fly in couples
And here's a dove immaculate spirit
Escorted by lyre-bird and shimmery peacock
Phoenix the pyre the self-resurrected
Obscures everything ardently briefly with ash
The sirens abandon their perilous channels
Each one singing more beautifully arrives
Everyone eagle Phoenix Chinese peehees
Eager to befriend a machine that flies
You are walking in Paris alone inside a crowd
Herds of buses bellow and come too close
Love-anguish clutches your throat
You must never again be loved
In the Dark Ages you would have entered a monastery
You are ashamed to overhear yourself praying
You laugh at yourself and the laughter crackles like hellfire
The sparks gild the ground and background of your life
Your life is a painting in a dark museum
And sometimes you examine it closely
You are walking in Paris the women are bloodsoaked
It was and I have no wish to remember it was the end of beauty
In Chartres from her entourage of flames Our Lady beamed at me
The blood of your Sacred Heart drenched me in Montmartre
I'm sick of hearing blissful promises
The love I feel is a venereal disease
And the image possessing you in your pain your insomnia
Vanishes and it is always near you
And now you are on the Riviera
Under lemon trees that never stop blooming
You are boating with friends
One is from Nice one is from Menton two from La Turbie
We are staring terrified at giant squid
At fish the symbols of Jesus swimming through seaweed
You are in the garden at an inn outside of Prague
You are completely happy a rose is on the table
And instead of getting on with your short-story
You watch the rosebug sleeping in the rose's heart
Appalled you see yourself reproduced in the agates of Saint Vitus
You were sad near to death to see yourself there
You looked as bewildered as Lazarus
In the Jewish ghetto the clock runs backwards
And you go backwards also through a slow life
Climbing the Hradchen listening at nightfall
To Bohemian songs in the singing taverns
You in Marseilles among the watermelons
Yu in Coblenz at the Hotel Gigantic
You in Rome beneath a Japanese tree
You in Amsterdam with a girl you find pretty who is ugly
She's engaged to marry a student from Leyden
Where you can rent rooms in Latin Cubicula locanda
I remember spending three days there and three in Gouda
You are in Paris hauled before the magistrate
You are under arrest you are a criminal now
You went on sorrowful and giddy travels
Ignorant still of dishonesty and old age
Love afflicted you at twenty and again at thirty
I've lived like a fool and I've wasted my time
You dare not look at your hands I want to weep all the time
On you on the one I love on everything that frightened you
And now you are crying at the sight of refugees
Who believe in God who pray whose women nurse babies
The hall of the train station is filled with the refugee-smell
Like the Magi refugees believe in their star
They expect to find silver mines in the Argentine
And to return like kings to their abandoned countries
One family carries a red eiderdown you carry your heart
Eiderdown and dreams are equally fantastic
Some of the refugees stay on in Paris settling
Into slums on the rue des Rosiers or the rue des Ecouffes
I have seen them often at dusk they breathe at their doorways
They budge from home as reluctantly as chessmen
They are chiefly Jewish the women wear wigs
And haunt backrooms of little shops in little chairs
You're standing at the metal counter of some dive
Drinking wretched coffee where the wretched live
You are in a cavernous restaurant at night
These women are not evil they are used-up regretful
Each has tormented someone even the ugliest
She is the daughter of a police sergeant from Jersey
Her hands I'd never noticed are hard and cracked
My pity aches along the seams of her belly
I humble my mouth to her grotesque laughter
You're alone when morning comes
The milkmen jingle bottles in the street
Night beautiful courtesan the night withdraws
Fraudulent Ferdine or careful Leah
And you drink an alcohol as caustic as your life
Your life you drink as alcohol
You walk to Auteuil you want to go on foot to sleep
At home among your South Sea and Guinean fetishes
Christs of another shape another faith
Subordinate Christs of uncertain hopes
Goodbye Goodbye
Sun cut throated

Guillaume Apollinaire

by this poet

Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away
And lovers
Must I be reminded
Joy came always after pain
The night is a clock chiming
The days go by not I
We're face to face and hand in hand
While under the bridges
Of embrace expire
Eternal tired tidal eyes
The night